


Days and Nights

by TimeSorceror



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Awkward Alistair, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, Grey Warden Stamina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-07 02:26:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8779504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TimeSorceror/pseuds/TimeSorceror
Summary: They spend the first night of their marriage apart, but they spend their days learning first to become friends... and later, lovers.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my Tumblr before Thanksgiving; now posting it here. Enjoy. ;)

They spend the first night of their marriage apart. 

Anora sleeps in her own rooms; Alistair does not. Instead, he sits in one of the reading chairs by the fire in their shared living space and watches the flames dance and flicker until, close to the early hours near dawn, he sleeps.

She finds him there in the morning, curled up in his rumpled clothing with faint tear tracks on his face.

Despite knowing that they have duties to attend to, she doesn’t have the heart to wake him. So she tells the servants to let the king sleep, and to have one posted outside until he wakes. 

He doesn’t ask her why when he sees her late in the afternoon. Though she can see the question in his furrowed brows and still-teary eyes, the ghost of a hunch in his shoulders even as he as he tries to stand straight, he says nothing. Instead, he greets her stiffly and kisses her hand ever so gently.

She tries to ignore the pang of _something_ that stabs her heart when he looks up at her through his lashes, lips still hovering over the skin, breath dancing invisible patterns that she can’t help but trace over when he lets go.

* * *

Time passes. 

Denerim is nearly recovered from the effects of the Blight. Anora knows this from the way the tenuous peace she has formed with the Alienage is becoming increasingly tenuous once more.

She and Alistair have yet to share a bed.

She knows she should probably be concerned for the sake of propriety, or reminding her husband that they need to at least _try_  for an heir sometime. 

But for whatever reason, she simply can’t bring herself to do it.

Speaking of Alistair, the man was surprisingly more capable as a ruler than she had expected. He wasn’t always the most well-spoken, nor did he always remember which fork to use at which meal. However he had an understanding of the Fereldan people that Anora did not, and despite the rift between them he was never afraid to ask for her help in resolving disputes.

One morning after rising early and dressing for the day, she finds Alistair breakfasting in their shared apartments. She’s surprised to see him up at this hour, and he grumbles something about the ham from last night. Surely, he told her, surely it had come from Orlais, because he knew of no other ham that could keep him up all night like that which tasted of despair.

And she laughed.

She laughed and he stared at her with wide eyes, eyes made of golden honey that glowed with the light of the rising sun.

Then she realized that she’d laughed at something he’d said and her laughter abruptly died on her lips with a gasp. She quickly let her gaze drop to the carpet, feeling her face flush from the dazed stare he was still giving her.

She mumbled something about forgetting a hair pin or some such in her dressing room and left in a rush. He was gone when she came back, but there was a message written on sheet of paper in tight, neatly printed handwriting which sat next to her breakfast plate. It read:

 _You should laugh more often. Y_ o _u have a beautiful laugh. – Alistair_

* * *

Alistair would never forget the sound of that laugh.

It would hound his thoughts for a long time, occupying every idle moment while awake and it danced through his dreams as he slept. 

He started watching her when she spoke to the nobles, the servants, the guards. He memorized the planes of her face, the color and texture of her hair in various lights, the shape of her eyes and lips… once, she almost caught him staring and he was infinitely more careful from then on.

At some point, he registers the fact that months have passed and Wintersend is nearly coming ‘round again.

He has a sudden desire to get Anora a gift but he has no idea what.

So he starts asking around, awkwardly stammering questions and trying to be as smooth about it as possible (and failing spectacularly at it). 

And then he remembers something that Arl Eamon had told him shortly after they’d rescued Anora from Arl Howe’s estate. She might be many things he’d said, but she was – at the end of the day – still her father’s daughter.

He presents the gift to her in the evening, glancing away and wringing his hands as she takes it with a curious expression. She’s blushing faintly, and Alistair realizes how much it highlights the strangely rounded sharpness of her cheekbones and the bright ice blue of her eyes.

She unwraps the gift, her curious expression changing first to one of wonder when she realizes what it is, and then something soft and wistful when she lays out a deeply detailed map of Ferelden on their breakfast table. 

Anora is quiet for a moment as she lets her fingers run across the paper, trailing the finely detailed trees of the Brecillian Forest, the Kocari Wilds… Ostagar.

She looks up, and their eyes meet.

He doesn’t remember the first or last time he’s held her gaze. Is this their first time? Then she’s speaking to him, asking him how he knew to get her this.

Her father had loved maps. Mahariel had mentioned in one of his infrequent letters that he’d learned that fact from one of his Wardens. Alistair tells her about the time he’d spent asking around the castle about her likes and dislikes and how terribly obvious he’d been about it. He tells her how amazed he is that she’d never caught on to him in all that time.

She laughs again. This one is softer and sadder than the one that keeps looping over and over in his head, but it’s just as captivating.

She tells him that he could’ve just, you know… asked _her_.

So he does.

He asks her things when they’re alone, things like what’s her favorite color and does she like cheese? (She does. Alistair about feels like swooning when she admits this, very quietly, during dinner one time.) He asks her what she likes to read and if she’d teach him how to improve his dancing or his diplomacy skills.

One evening after they’ve both retired to their rooms, Alistair is suddenly struck with the thought that… he doesn’t know her birthday.

So he gets up and knocks on her door, but she doesn’t answer. Concerned, he opens it and enters… just as she’s exiting the bathing chamber in nothing but a towel. She shrieks a little in surprise, and Alistair’s gaze drops quickly to the floor, though not before getting a glimpse of breasts and curves along the way.

He stammers out his question, and for a while she’s silent except for her rapid breathing as she catches her breath.

Quietly, she answers him and there’s a little laughter in her voice as she does. Ever the gentlemen, Alistair apologizes for his lack of manners and makes a swift exit to his rooms. 

And when he finally falls asleep, the laughter is accompanied by a pair of soft, round breasts and the gentle curve of a waist that belong to the body which continues to occupy his idle thoughts when he wakes.

* * *

Then he starts finding ways to be close to her.

Little touches during meals (fingers lingering as he hands her the salt, elbows brushing as he walks behind and picks up her finished dish to move it to the tray the servants pick up later), holding her hand for a few seconds too long when he kisses it in greeting before receiving the people’s grievances, pressing his side against hers _just so_ when they’re out making public appearances…

He wonders when she’ll notice and tell him to stop.

She notices, but she never says a word.

And then comes the anniversary of the Landsmeet. He finds her crying silently in the garden, the one where her father’s ashes were scattered. He watches for awhile, not certain if his touch would be welcome, but he can’t bear to watch her shoulders shake as she holds herself close with no one to comfort her. He still has trouble thinking of her father as anything but a traitor, though Alistair is adamant that he doesn’t think of Anora in this way. He makes sure she can hear his footsteps as he approaches, and – strangely – she seems to know it’s him when he gingerly lays his hands on her, pulling her into an embrace that starts out stiff and strange but slowly becomes less so the longer it goes on.

Impulsively he bends down to kiss her hair and is surprised to wonder what it would feel like if pressed against skin.

They don’t discuss it later, but when he moves to the sofa after their meal to do some reading, she joins him. Neither speaks, but they read their own books in comfortable silence until one of them retires to bed.

It takes them longer and longer each night to leave.

One night, it takes them so long that when Alistair thinks he’s ready to retire for the night, he realizes how deep Anora is breathing, how heavy she lays against him. She’s asleep. Has been for a while now, since she’s still on the page one-hundred something she’d been on when he’d last looked. He wonders why he didn’t notice when she’d stopped turning the pages, but he finds that doesn’t matter as much as the feeling her warm body against his stirs in his breast.

He realizes that now might be a good time to see if her skin feels the way he thinks it might against his lips, and he presses a gentle kiss to her forehead.

It is so much more than he’d imagined.

* * *

She wouldn’t tell him this for many years, but Anora remembered that kiss.

Even though the sensation of it felt like a distant dream, she remembers it every time the weight of being Queen chafes _just_ the wrong way for a moment too long. She remembers it in every little touch, every kiss he steals when he thinks she’s asleep. Every time he makes a joke about any and every topic he can to make her laugh (it’s the ones about Orlais that make her laugh the most), she remembers.

She begins to wonder if he loves her, though she knows better than to let herself hope.

So it’s in moments when such thoughts try to overwhelm her that she remembers the way that first kiss against her forehead made her feel, how her heart had fluttered in her chest like a blighted butterfly in a way it hadn’t ever done for Cailan. She remembers how safe and loved that kiss had made her feel. It’s during the moments when they’re greeting the less tactful nobility who make thinly veined barbs about her lineage, her heritage, her assumed barren status, that she remembers that feeling.

She wears it like armor. 

And then she notices how those barbs make him tense beside her, his fists curled and knuckles white, teeth gritted in anger. She reaches out without thinking and covers his hand with hers.

He looks at her the same way he did the first time she’d laughed at breakfast.

The hours pass without incident, though it was a close thing. Their last appointment of the morning had been with a Bann who’d made yet _another_ dig at the lack of… announcements as to any potential heirs to the throne. And this one didn’t even bother veiling his accusations. But Alistair – white knuckled and tense once more – somehow managed to find the grace to dismiss the man without leaping from his seat and removing a few of the man’s teeth for his trouble. She doubts the man knows how close he came to harm.

And he’d been insulting _her_ , as if it were _her_ fault and not Alistair’s.

This had not sat well with Alistair. 

As soon as they were far enough away from the hall, near the gardens where her father’s ashes had been scattered, he started grumbling under his breath and talking at her as he usually did when he got riled by the idiocy that continued to walk into their halls and ask them if they could do this or that or some other impossible thing.

She tells him he shouldn’t let their words bother him. They’re just words.

He stops and turns to her, meeting her eyes briefly before shouting at the floor that _no; they’re not just words._

_He insulted my wife! As king I know that all I can do is squeeze that snake just a little too tight as I throw him out the doors and that’ll be that, but as a man? Anora, I can’t ignore that. I just can’t, I…_

He stops mid-sentence when he realizes how close they are. 

She can see the tiny veins at the edges of his eyes, the individual pores of his skin, the faint scars and little pockmarks that came from fighting darkspawn and dragons that no one could see from a distance, but up close… she saw them all. They stayed that way for a moment before she found the courage to break the silence.

_You don’t need to care so much, husband. I can look after myself._

And then he shakes his head sadly.

 _Oh Anora_ , he sighs. _That’s the thing – you shouldn’t have to. You **don’t** have to. Not anymore_.

That’s when he gently takes her face into her hands and kisses her.

She would remember _that_ kiss too. She would remember it for a long, long time.

* * *

After that, her days slowly become filled with kisses. 

Most aren’t quite like that first one, all passion and tenderness with a touch of heat behind it.

No. Most aren’t like that at all.

Instead he presses gentle kisses to her temple or her cheek when he greets her in the morning, and he peppers soft, lingering kisses on her lips during the days where their duties lie apart. He kisses her again when they sit for dinner and sometimes at lunch, sometimes at the corner of her lips instead of on them, sometimes in the shell of her ear (because he likes the way she shrieks and laughs when he uses a touch of tongue there).

And then sometimes he’ll seek her out – in the library or the garden – and he’ll wrap his arms around her from behind as he kisses the crook of her neck, warm and wet and tender.

Sometimes she’ll turn around and return those kisses, and suddenly the kisses gain in interesting heat to them that goes beyond tenderness. 

When they inevitably part from these kisses, she sees a hungry look in his eyes that she’s certain are a reflection of her own desire as they are a window into his, but he simply presses his forehead to hers and gives her one last soft kiss on the nose before heading back to wherever he’d been before he’d found her.

Some days he wasn’t able to get away.

On those days, he’d leave her things in the places he knew she’d be or he sent her things through servants, little things like small boxes of her favorite chocolates or cuttings of the flowers from the garden where her father’s ashes had been scattered, and always, always, they came with a note written in his neatly printed hand. 

Once, one that came with a few chocolates said:

_You are sweeter than even the sweetest of these. Sometimes I wish more people knew._

Another that came with a small bowl of lilies of the valley said:

_Someone told me once that these were an anniversary gift. I know I sort of missed the boat on that one but… I think these would look pretty in your hair. If you’re even the sort of person who likes that… do you like that? I should’ve asked, shouldn’t I? Well, they smell nice. Like you._

And it was either one or the other when it came to Alistair. 

Either his notes were strangely, inexplicably more beautiful and profound than one might expect him to be, while others were exactly what one might expect – all rambling words and adorable, fretting concern.

Neither of these ever failed to make her smile. And she kept every one.

It was only a matter of time before the kisses that filled her days also began to fill her nights. Their nights.

The day of the first night they share a bed was nothing particularly special. But when she arrives to their apartments to have dinner, she opens the door to find him presenting her with a bouquet of red chrysanthemums, and their dinner table lit of by the light of a few candles and the soft glow of the nearby hearth.

This dinner is unlike any of the dinners they’d shared before.

Somehow, they can’t keep their eyes (or their hands) off of one another in order to eat, and eventually the two abandon the dinner altogether in favor of retiring early… though she knows that there’s little chance of anything remotely resembling _restful_ sleep that’s to be happening between them tonight.

It’s not perfect, by any means. She knows from what he told her once, in the very early days of their marriage, that he’s never actually been with a woman.

Or anyone, really.

So she helps him to help her undress while she does the same for him, and eventually coaxes him into bed where she knows that, despite his lack of experience, the gentle reminders of nature will guide him in this dance.

Along with a few pointers of her own, of course.

But all throughout the experience, he is intent on covering her with his kisses, and she thinks she might come just from them and the stimulation he brings her as he prepares her according to her instructions. There’s not much of a chance to find out though as he pulls away to begin their joining, and there’s little room for thought once they’re flush with one another. 

And while he is sweet and attentive, running his fingers through her hair and his hands over her chest and dragging his nails lightly along her sides, it isn’t until he thrusts once and kisses the crook of her neck so hard she knows he’s likely left a mark that she’s able to crest over with him following shortly after.

He stayed with her through the aftershocks, rolling them to their sides and waiting until she wasn’t trembling quite so much from their activities before pulling out and rolling over. 

She cozied up to him then, trying to encourage him to stay when she noticed that he was becoming… interested again.

A single raised eyebrow rewarded her with a blush and a stammering explanation about some less… well-known aspects about Grey Warden stamina. She grinned, and decided to take it upon herself to make certain that he was as completely satisfied as she.

They did not spend their nights apart from that point on.


End file.
